Students at six universities filed legal complaints on Monday accusing their colleges of breaking a little-known law by investing in planet-heating fossil fuels, the Guardian has learned.
Campus organizers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Tufts University, Pomona College, Washington University in St Louis and Pennsylvania State University wrote to the attorneys general of their respective states to ask officials to scrutinize their universities’ investments. Each filing elicited signatures of support from dozens of faculty and staff members, alumni and local, national and international climate-focused groups.
The students argue that by investing in coal, oil and gas, the schools are violating their obligations as non-profit organizations to prioritize the public interest.
“Fossil fuel companies have long engaged in a well-documented campaign to undermine climate science and distort public debate about how to deal with the climate crisis – including through efforts targeting Penn scientists and researchers,” University of Pennsylvania students wrote in their filing. “The industry’s spread of scientific misinformation undermines the work of Penn faculty and students who are researching and designing solutions for a sustainable future.”
The filings estimate that each of the schools has tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars invested in fossil fuels.
“If universities say, ‘We’re climate leaders, we stand for justice,’ but then on the other hand financially contribute to the climate crisis, we just see that as unacceptable,” said Moli Ma, an undergraduate student at Tufts, who helped lead the complaint against her university. “There’s an incongruence there. It doesn’t match up.”
The six complaints follow more than a dozen similar initiatives at colleges around the US, beginning with Boston College in 2020. The filings were written with help from the Climate Defense Project, a non-profit environmental law organization.
State officials have not affirmed any of the legal filings, but several schools – including Harvard, Cornell and Stanford – said they would divest from fossil fuels shortly after complaints against them were filed.
“We feel like this might have been the last straw that really pushed Harvard’s administration over the edge on divestment,” said Ma, who is part of the Tufts Climate Action student group. “We wanted to replicate the success that happened there.”
Four of Monday’s filings allege that schools breached the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, a law adopted by 49 states requiring non-profit institutions to consider their “charitable purposes” in their investments and to do so with “prudence” and “loyalty”.
Pennsylvania has not passed such a law, so students’ legal complaints against the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State University are based on similar regulations that fall under the state’s Decedents, Estates, and Fiduciary Code.
In interviews, the student organizers noted that the climate crisis had wreaked havoc on each of their universities’ home states, whether through more frequent and severe wildfires in Pomona College’s California or more devastating heatwaves in Washington University in St Louis’s Missouri. Those disasters often disproportionately harm youth, poor communities and people of color, the complaints note.
Another key argument in each complaint: investing in fossil fuel stocks not only harms the climate and threatens human health, but also creates financial risk.
“We make the case that fossil fuels from a purely financial point of view are a very bad investment,” said Ted Hamilton, a lawyer with the Climate Defense Project who has worked on each of the legal filings. “This sector is very volatile. It’s been underperforming lately, and especially for long-term institutional investors like universities, it has a very bad value thesis [for] the coming decades.”
The complaints build on pre-existing fossil fuel divestment efforts at each of the six universities. Students said they had heard college officials defend their continued financial backing of fossil fuels in various ways, from touting their existing efforts to clean up investments to arguing that investment should not be governed by specific political agendas.
“Investing in fossil fuels is a political statement,” said Clara Dutton, a student organizer at Washington University in St Louis. “And it’s a hypocritical one.”
Bill McKibben, the veteran environmental activist and author, supports the students’ efforts.
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“Some of these institutions have produced world-class climate science, all of them are in places facing huge climate threats, and yet they’re still trying to profit off the most dangerous thing humans have ever done,” said McKibben, who has been calling for fossil fuel divestment – including from universities – for more than a decade.
Each of the six schools has also made pledges to boost sustainability and engaged in climate research, but Hamilton said that does not undercut the validity of the legal claims.
“The fact that they are doing these wonderful, sustainable things is a recognition that this was part of their charitable mission, part of the reason why they’re raising money and promoting their vision of the public good,” he said.
Ron Ozio, spokesperson for the University of Pennsylvania, said his institution’s board of trustees has “thoughtfully reviewed” requests to divest from fossil fuels.
In a November 2022 statement, University of Pennsylvania officials said: “Selling fossil fuel investments does not end fossil fuel production or create clean energy alternatives, and it risks transferring ownership to buyers who may care little for the environmental consequences of their actions.”
The students, however, said they do not believe their colleges divesting their endowments from fossil fuels would cause oil and gas to collapse. But refusal to do so represents a tacit endorsement of an industry that is fueling planetary destruction, they said.
The action comes amid rising pressure on institutions to cut ties with fossil fuel companies. This fall, New York University pledged to divest from coal, oil and gas firms following years of pressure from activists. About 250 US educational institutions have divested from fossil fuels, according to data from Stand.earth and 350.org.
In an email, Pomona College said it was still reviewing the legal filing, but stated it was “strongly committed to environmental sustainability and to reaching carbon neutrality for our campus by 2030”.
Even in the absence of legal complaints, McKibben said he expects more universities to divest from fossil fuels, but added that he hoped the students’ action can “hustle them along”.
“The planet is running out of time for their games,” he said.